Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II - The Arcade Game Review

The turtle’s franchise took an enormous turn for the better with TMNT II: The Arcade Game. Don’t get me wrong, the first turtle’s game on the NES was good, but very hard. With the turtle’s in the arcade already, a port to the NES was all this series needed.

Turtles II The Arcade Game was the second installment of the tmnt series

Which was a side-scrolling beat’em up game. You have a choice to choose to play as any one of the four turtles. As already know, each turtle has their own weapon of choice you can use if you select a particular turtle.

Turtle's And Description of Weapon

• Leonardo – Katana Blades (Dual Welding)
• Donatello – Bo (Long Wooden Staf)
• Raphael – Sai (Dual Welding)
• Michelangelo – Nun chucks (Dual Welding)

Turtles II has the option for either a one (1)-player game or a two (2)-player game. The controls of the game are pretty easy to use. Pressing the “A” button your character would jump in the air or flip, pressing the “B” button in the air would create a flying jump kick.

This type of jump kick was key to master

As many bosses required this move to beat them and stay out of harms way.  The flying kick was also good for avoiding the mass amounts of enemies on the screen at a give time. If you were to press both the “A” and “B” button at the same time, your turtle would do a sweep attach with his weapon, which could kill any enemies contacted with one shot. Mastering this move is crucial, as you could easily destroy every enemy easily with the sweep attack.

In this particular game, I found 3 of the 4 turtles to be good for playing, I thought Raphael’s weapons had a short reach, and made it difficult at times to destroy your enemies without taking some sort of damage.

The Story: Of Turtles II: The Arcade Game

It is very similar to that of the 90s TMNT cartoon, which was airing on national television during the time this game was released. In the opening scene of the game, you find that April and Splinter have been captured by the foot clan. So it’s up to the turtles to rescue April and Splinter and destroy the foot clan along the way, and the evil shredder battling your way through 6 grueling not stop beat’up levels.

The plot and characters

All remind me of the cartoon, but they’re a few boss encounters where I didn’t remember the boss at all from the cartoon. The boss battles for the most part are pretty challenging, and you need to use skillful tactics in order to defeat the boss without dying.   When a boss is close to being beat, the character blinks or turns a different color, signifying the end of the character.

I did think the general foot clan enemies that came at you in Turtles II seemed a little harder to defeat than that of turtles III.  Again, this game did a good job of keeping up with fresh new characters along your journey. The further into the game you got, the more different characters evolved.  This point is key for any beat’em up game of this genre, a constant flow of newer characters and challenges keeps you interested in the continuing your journey to defeat shredder.

I don’t generally touch on graphics much in my NES reviews

But many turtle reviews say the graphics in turtles III The Manhattan Project is far superior. I find this to be false, the graphics on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game takes the nod for me. Turtles The Manhattan Project has so many glitches you encounter through your journey, and I encountered less than a handful of glitches playing through Turtles II. The graphics on either game isn’t mind-blowing, but keeping in mind we are talking about 8 bit, Turtles II is the winner.

Conclusion: Would I recommend playing Turtles II?

The "TMNT" turtle’s series of Nintendo NES games, that thrived due to national attention the cartoon received. These games were a direct result of the cartoon phenomenon, but the games really didn’t disappoint for Nintendo NES Standards. For any retro NES fan, having at least one (1) copy of a turtle’s game in your library is a must.

You’ll certainly get more re-play ability with either Turtles II or TMNT III. Really for me, it seems like a coin flip fore which one I’d recommend, I guess I’d say Turtles II is the better game!